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Pitasanna Shanmugathas: Last year was the 30 th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. In your award-winning book, In Praise of Blood , you talk about the popular myths and misconceptions behind the Rwandan genocide, and you dispel the notion of Paul Kagame as a savior. Using census data showing , Tutsi in Rwanda before the violence, and records showing , survived, they concluded that among the estimated 1 million total deaths, more than half may have been Hutu.
Their research found multiple types of violence occurred: genocide against Tutsi, civil war deaths, random killings, and revenge attacks by both sides. When they presented these findings in Rwanda, they were banned from the country.
What are your thoughts on their research and why their findings might be controversial? In other words, the figure is propaganda and it obfuscates the numbers of Hutus who were slaughtered by RPF forces. Some of these scholars estimated the number of Tutsis killed to be in the range of , to ,, and posited that hundreds of thousands of Hutus died in and in the years afterward, although the nature of the deaths of Hutus whether it was due to direct violence or war-related malnutrition or disease was not examined.
No quantitative or qualitative studies were conducted in Hutu refugee camps in neighbouring Congo, Zambia, Tanzania, and later Uganda, asking Hutus what they experienced in , why they ran away, how their loved ones died and why they chose to languish in seething camps instead of returning home after July There has been no empirical research based on rigorous interviews with Hutusβor Tutsis for that matterβin exile, free from the spectre of reward or punishment, that tell us what they endured in their most excruciatingly difficult moments.
